A curious early fifteenth-century story is associated with this charnel house. One morning the wife of Adam de la Gonesse and her niece, two bourgeoises of Paris, went abroad to have a little flutter and eat two sous’ worth of tripe in a new inn. On their way they met Dame Tifaigne the milliner, who recommended the tavern of the “Maillez,” where the wine was excellent. Thither they went and drank not wisely but too well. When fifteen sous had already been spent, they determined to make a day of it and ordered roast goose with hot cakes. After further drinking, gauffres, cheese, peeled almonds, pears, spices and walnuts were called for and the feast ended in songs. When the “bad quarter of an hour” came they had not enough money to pay, and parted with some of their finery to meet the score. At midnight they left the inn dancing and singing,—
“Amours au vireli m’en vois.”
The streets of Paris, however, at midnight were unsafe even for sober ladies, and these soon fell among thieves, were stripped of the rest of their clothing, then taken up for dead by the watch and flung into the mortuary in the Cemetery of the Innocents; but to the terror of the gravedigger were found lying outside the next morning singing,—
“Druin, Druin, ou es allez?
Apporte trois harens salez
Et un pot de vin du plus fort.”
The huge piles of skulls and human remains that grinned from under the gable roof of the gallery painted with the Dance of Death were in 1786 carted away to the catacombs under Paris, formed by the old Gallo-Roman quarrymen as they quarried the stone used to build Lutetia. An immense area of picturesque Halles and streets:—the Halle aux Draps; the Marché des Herboristes, with their mysterious stores of simples and healing herbs and leeches; the Marché aux Pommes de Terre et aux Oignons; the butter and cheese markets; the fish market; the queer old Rue de la Tonnellerie, under whose shabby porticoes, sellers of rags, old clothes, iron and furniture, crowded against the bread market; the Marché des Prouvaires, beloved of thrifty housewives—all are swallowed up by the vast modern structure of iron and glass, known as Les Halles. The Halle au Blé, or corn market, last to disappear, was built on the site of the Hôtel de la Reine which Catherine de’ Medici had erected when frightened from the Tuileries by her astrologer Ruggieri. The site is now occupied by the Bourse de Commerce. One curious decorated and channelled column, however, which conceals a stairway used by Catherine and her Italian familiar when they ascended to the roof to consult the stars, was preserved and made into a fountain in 1812. It still stands against the new Bourse in the Rue de Viarmes. North of the Halles the small Rue Pirouette recalls the old revolving pillory of the Halles, and yet further north, between Nos. 100 and 102 Rue Réamur, a dingy old passage leads to the Cour des Miracles, which Victor Hugo has made famous in Notre Dame. There, too, was the gambling hell kept by Jean Dubarry, paramour of Jeanne Vaubernier, who was the daughter of a monk and became the famous mistress of Louis XV. She was married by Louis to Guillaume, brother of Jean Dubarry, to give her some standing at court.
